Cultural hybridity is a celebrated hallmark of American music and identity. Yet hybrid music is all too often marked — and marketed — under a single racial label. Tamara Roberts's Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that counter this convention; these projects instead foreground racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound in the very face of the ghettoizing culture industry. Giving voice to four contemporary projects, author Tamara Roberts traces black/Asian engagements that reach across the United States and beyond: Funkadesi, Yoko Noge, Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, and Red Baraat. From Indian funk and reggae, to Japanese folk and blues, to jazz in various Asian and African traditions, to Indian brass band and New Orleans second line, these artists live multiracial lives in which they inhabit — and yet exceed — multicultural frameworks built on essentialism and segregation.

When these musicians collaborate, they generate and perform racially marked sounds that do not conform to their individual racial identities. Resounding Afro Asia joins a growing body of literature that is writing Asian American artists back into US popular music history, while highlighting interracial engagements that have fueled U.S. music making.

The author was a Townsend Fellow in 2012-13.